Grammar deployment is the process of turning a given grammar specification into
a working parser. The Grammar Deployment
Kit (for short, GDK) provides tool support in this process based on firm
grammar engineering methods. We are mainly interested in the
deployment of grammars for software renovation tools, that is, tools for
software re- and reverse engineering. GDK is geared towards the Cobol
family of languages. We assume that grammar deployment starts from an initial
grammar specification which is maybe still ambiguous or even
incomplete. In practice, grammar deployment binds unaffordable human resources
because of the unavailability of suitable grammar specifications,
the diversity of parsing technology as well as the limitations of the
technology, integration problems regarding the development of software
renovation functionality, and the lack of tools and adherence to firm methods
for grammar engineering. GDK helps to largely automate grammar
deployment because tool support for grammar adaptation and parser generation is
provided. We support different parsing technologies, among them
btyacc (that is, yacc with backtracking) which is a
mainstream technology in the renovation context. GDK is free software.

The main application of GDK is a
VS COBOL II parser.
Try it out to see how GDK is used in practice for various
reengineering frameworks. There is now also a smaller, more
in depth, demo
for the Tiger language included in the GDK distribution itself.
This contains the step by step recipe (see file gdk/demo/README)
we use ourselves to deploy a grammar for
our own reengineering framework.

Although I know that it is possible to set up mailing lists and forums and
what not, I would prefer to be contacted directly via email until the
project gets enough active users (lets say 42) to make mailing lists
and such useful. My email: jkort@xs4all.nl.